I DIDN'T LIKE REPORTING ON THE OMAGH BOMB
I didn't like... reporting on the Omagh bomb... I had a sense of invading people's privacy... of stepping on their graves
The Omagh Bomb Story
By Martina Devlin
Even from early news bulletins, you knew it was disaster on an epic scale. But it wasn't possible to make a phone call to check on family members - many lines were down from the force of the explosion. All you could do was jump in a car and drive.
And that's what I did as news filtered through about, the Omagh bomb. I drove from Dublin to Omagh and conducted a head count of parents, brothers, aunts, in-laws, nieces and nephews.
A brother was unaccounted for, listed as missing. He'd been evacuated from his place of work when the garbled warning came through. But had he been shepherded into the path of the explosion, as so many were?
It was some hours before we knew he was safe, hours in which we aged a decade. We weren't the only family to go through that experience, but we were certainly luckier than some.
A sister-in-law had taken her 10-year-old twin daughters shopping, as so many did that sunny Saturday afternoon. They were in a shop a few feet away from where the car packed with 200kg of explosives was parked.
Miraculously, they were uninjured, but exposed to sights no children should witness.
It's hard to see tragedy strike close to home. Harder again if you must cover that disaster as a journalist, when all you want to do is be as one with the community. Not probing its pain, expressing to the world how it's coping. On home turf, objectivity is inaccessible.
Descriptions such as massacre and catastrophe are not words anyone would choose to apply to the small town where they grew up. Yet how else could the Omagh bomb be described? Hyperbole was not possible.
Amateur video footage showed blood-spattered survivors gasping in the immediate aftermath of the bomb. The air around them was smoky, lending everything an unreal tone. Some stood dazed, uncomprehending; others wore their fingers to stumps scrabbling through rubble for their companions.
I didn't like my job, reporting on the Omagh bomb. At times I had a sense not just of invading people's privacy but stepping on their graves. Yet I was from the town and someone would be sent to do this job if I backed away. Better me than an outsider, I rationalised. I felt overwhelmingly protective of the people, as I spoke to them about an event none of us had yet come to grips with. We were all fumbling through this - what? Nightmare? It sounds too trite.
One interview that stays with me, all these years later, was a conversation I had with the older brother of a teenager who was missing - last seen in a sports shop not far from the blast.
He was waiting for news in an incident room set up in the Leisure Centre. It was easy to pick out family members here: they were the ones who circled restlessly, or whose eyes wore the flinching expression of people braced for bad news.
I asked him about his brother and listened to him describe Alan Radford as a quiet 16-year-old mad about sports gear. He spoke of hope in a hesitant way. I looked into his face and pitied him for what was to come, and he looked back and knew the time for hope had passed. Alan was already lying dead at this stage.
At church services the day after the bomb, a number of the worshippers wore bandages from shrapnel wounds. So many had been injured - around 370 people, I heard later. Congregations knelt and prayed for relatives, friends, workmates, neighbours. Some put their faces in their hands and wept.
It was the subversion of the ordinary that shocked people so. Many of the shoppers had been picking up school uniforms, two weeks before the new term.
Details of those who died emerged. A father and son. A Sunday school teacher who had just got engaged. A mother, her daughter and granddaughter. Most died from multiple injuries. Their bodies lay in a temporary morgue in the British Army camp.
Later it would take the coroner 12 minutes just to list the dead, their occupations and cause of death. The police officers giving evidence were traumatised, never mind the relatives.
In subsequent weeks, I remember my sense of outrage at seeing tourists photograph the bomb site, or asking for directions to where it happened.
"Omagh's not just about a bomb - it's about a community that survived a bomb," I wanted to tell them.
I resented that the town was now identified with carnage. People had rarely heard of Omagh before August 15, 1998. "Where did you say you're from? Armagh? Omaha?" was a common reaction. Now it was a place name that resonated.
For a while I took to saying Tyrone, leaving Omagh out of it. Not wanting to face the inevitable questions. And then I decided to stop doing that: to reclaim Omagh from the act of aggression. It was still our town, irrespective of that Real IRA bomb.
Time passes. I can't say it heals all wounds because it doesn't. But the town has regrouped, moved on. That's not to say it forgets. To forget would be to dishonour the dead.
I tend to remember the children best, the ones whose lives were only just beginning: the babies, the young boys, the teenagers. One of those who comes to mind is 12-year-old Fernando Blasco Baselga.
Recently I looked at the Madrid schoolboy's signature left in the Ulster American Folk Park visitors' book - Viva Espana he had written after his name, in an exuberant hand - and it was sobering, moving, pitiful to realise he was just an hour or so away from death when he penned it.
It's only one among a huge collection of items held at Omagh library, where a bomb archive has been organised and categorised by librarian Evelyn Johns. It's open to the public, by appointment, and well worth a visit.
Last week I read 81-year-old Beragh farmer Michael Grimes' book, 'Till We Meet Again', dedicated to the victims. People write books for many different reasons but his was better than most: he believed Mary, his wife of 42 years, would have liked him to do it.
The father of 11 suffered on an almost unimaginable scale, losing not just Mary but his daughter Avril Monaghan and granddaughter Maura Monaghan, as well as the unborn twins Avril was carrying. But his dignity, lack of recrimination and faith that he will one day be reunited with those he loves is extraordinary. It reminded me how a bomb can destroy only so much - not everything can be torn apart.
This is what I like to bear in mind about August 15, 1998. Yes, something appalling happened on that day. The bomb to end bombs? That's always been too much to hope for.
It's a bomb that reminds me to be thankful for the peace process, however. I haven't yet learned to take it for granted, but I'm hoping the generation after me will.
The Omagh Bomb Story
By Martina Devlin
Even from early news bulletins, you knew it was disaster on an epic scale. But it wasn't possible to make a phone call to check on family members - many lines were down from the force of the explosion. All you could do was jump in a car and drive.
And that's what I did as news filtered through about, the Omagh bomb. I drove from Dublin to Omagh and conducted a head count of parents, brothers, aunts, in-laws, nieces and nephews.
A brother was unaccounted for, listed as missing. He'd been evacuated from his place of work when the garbled warning came through. But had he been shepherded into the path of the explosion, as so many were?
It was some hours before we knew he was safe, hours in which we aged a decade. We weren't the only family to go through that experience, but we were certainly luckier than some.
A sister-in-law had taken her 10-year-old twin daughters shopping, as so many did that sunny Saturday afternoon. They were in a shop a few feet away from where the car packed with 200kg of explosives was parked.
Miraculously, they were uninjured, but exposed to sights no children should witness.
It's hard to see tragedy strike close to home. Harder again if you must cover that disaster as a journalist, when all you want to do is be as one with the community. Not probing its pain, expressing to the world how it's coping. On home turf, objectivity is inaccessible.
Descriptions such as massacre and catastrophe are not words anyone would choose to apply to the small town where they grew up. Yet how else could the Omagh bomb be described? Hyperbole was not possible.
Amateur video footage showed blood-spattered survivors gasping in the immediate aftermath of the bomb. The air around them was smoky, lending everything an unreal tone. Some stood dazed, uncomprehending; others wore their fingers to stumps scrabbling through rubble for their companions.
I didn't like my job, reporting on the Omagh bomb. At times I had a sense not just of invading people's privacy but stepping on their graves. Yet I was from the town and someone would be sent to do this job if I backed away. Better me than an outsider, I rationalised. I felt overwhelmingly protective of the people, as I spoke to them about an event none of us had yet come to grips with. We were all fumbling through this - what? Nightmare? It sounds too trite.
One interview that stays with me, all these years later, was a conversation I had with the older brother of a teenager who was missing - last seen in a sports shop not far from the blast.
He was waiting for news in an incident room set up in the Leisure Centre. It was easy to pick out family members here: they were the ones who circled restlessly, or whose eyes wore the flinching expression of people braced for bad news.
I asked him about his brother and listened to him describe Alan Radford as a quiet 16-year-old mad about sports gear. He spoke of hope in a hesitant way. I looked into his face and pitied him for what was to come, and he looked back and knew the time for hope had passed. Alan was already lying dead at this stage.
At church services the day after the bomb, a number of the worshippers wore bandages from shrapnel wounds. So many had been injured - around 370 people, I heard later. Congregations knelt and prayed for relatives, friends, workmates, neighbours. Some put their faces in their hands and wept.
It was the subversion of the ordinary that shocked people so. Many of the shoppers had been picking up school uniforms, two weeks before the new term.
Details of those who died emerged. A father and son. A Sunday school teacher who had just got engaged. A mother, her daughter and granddaughter. Most died from multiple injuries. Their bodies lay in a temporary morgue in the British Army camp.
Later it would take the coroner 12 minutes just to list the dead, their occupations and cause of death. The police officers giving evidence were traumatised, never mind the relatives.
In subsequent weeks, I remember my sense of outrage at seeing tourists photograph the bomb site, or asking for directions to where it happened.
"Omagh's not just about a bomb - it's about a community that survived a bomb," I wanted to tell them.
I resented that the town was now identified with carnage. People had rarely heard of Omagh before August 15, 1998. "Where did you say you're from? Armagh? Omaha?" was a common reaction. Now it was a place name that resonated.
For a while I took to saying Tyrone, leaving Omagh out of it. Not wanting to face the inevitable questions. And then I decided to stop doing that: to reclaim Omagh from the act of aggression. It was still our town, irrespective of that Real IRA bomb.
Time passes. I can't say it heals all wounds because it doesn't. But the town has regrouped, moved on. That's not to say it forgets. To forget would be to dishonour the dead.
I tend to remember the children best, the ones whose lives were only just beginning: the babies, the young boys, the teenagers. One of those who comes to mind is 12-year-old Fernando Blasco Baselga.
Recently I looked at the Madrid schoolboy's signature left in the Ulster American Folk Park visitors' book - Viva Espana he had written after his name, in an exuberant hand - and it was sobering, moving, pitiful to realise he was just an hour or so away from death when he penned it.
It's only one among a huge collection of items held at Omagh library, where a bomb archive has been organised and categorised by librarian Evelyn Johns. It's open to the public, by appointment, and well worth a visit.
Last week I read 81-year-old Beragh farmer Michael Grimes' book, 'Till We Meet Again', dedicated to the victims. People write books for many different reasons but his was better than most: he believed Mary, his wife of 42 years, would have liked him to do it.
The father of 11 suffered on an almost unimaginable scale, losing not just Mary but his daughter Avril Monaghan and granddaughter Maura Monaghan, as well as the unborn twins Avril was carrying. But his dignity, lack of recrimination and faith that he will one day be reunited with those he loves is extraordinary. It reminded me how a bomb can destroy only so much - not everything can be torn apart.
This is what I like to bear in mind about August 15, 1998. Yes, something appalling happened on that day. The bomb to end bombs? That's always been too much to hope for.
It's a bomb that reminds me to be thankful for the peace process, however. I haven't yet learned to take it for granted, but I'm hoping the generation after me will.
Further Information
Publisher: ULSTER HERALD
Ref: UH10An/42
Published Date: 14-Aug-08
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